Take Sugar, Eggs, Beliefs . . . And Aim

By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA

Published: December 10, 2000

TIME was when being embarrassed meant having egg on your face. These days, it's more likely to mean having a pie in it. Just ask Frank E. Loy, the under secretary of state for global affairs. Last month in The Hague, as he was delivering his daily briefing at the United Nations climate conference, a protester hit him with a cream pie.

The incident was the latest in a series of high-profile pastry attacks. The premier of Victoria, Australia, Steve Bracks, got whapped in October at the opening of the Melbourne Museum. In August, the Prince Edward Island Pie Brigade planted its weapon of choice on the Canadian premier, Jean Chretian. Other victims this year include Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman and Michel Camdessus, the International Monetary Fund managing director.

Until recently, pieing had gone the way of streaking. Its last major casualty was Anita Bryant in 1977. ''Everyone associates this with the Yippies and the politics of spectacle,'' said Paul Lyons, author of ''New Left, New Right and the Legacy of the Streets'' (Temple University Press, 1996). But ever since a Belgian contingent fired a volley of fluffy projectiles at Bill Gates in 1998, it's been one fling after another.

Obscurity is no defense. Minnesota State Senator Carol Flynn was hit with a lemon coconut cream pie for her role in the rerouting of a local highway. Minutes after being crowned Miss Rodeo America 2000 in Las Vegas, Brandy DeJongh got mushed by a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

''I predicted this,'' said Aron Kay, the godfather of the pie-tossing set, who put out hits on such notables as McGeorge Bundy, G. Gordon Liddy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1970's and 80's. ''Everyone has someone who needs to get pied.''

The use of pies as ordnance, of course, is a hallmark of silent comedy; the shtick culminated with the hurling of more than 3,000 pies in the 1927 Laurel and Hardy film ''Battle of the Century.''

Today, such innocence has given way to more political purposes. Exactly 30 years have passed since the modern pie movement's opening salvo: a 1970 assault on the Senate Commission on Obscenity and Pornography by Tom Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine.

Pie-throwing is one way of venting anger at a world that has become maddeningly complex and intrusive, said Alexander Bloom, a professor of American history at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and co-editor of ''Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader'' (Oxford University Press, 1995). ''There is this basic undercurrent of people who are feeling that all these forces beyond their control -- from the I.M.F. to the W.T.O. to Y2K to H.M.O.'s -- are in charge of their lives and are operating outside of the political process,'' he said. ''I think people feel frustrated.''

Pieing may also be part of a resurgent wave of political theater, typified by the protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. ''Over the last year, a movement that I thought was thoroughly dead is not dead,'' said Barbara Epstein, a professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. ''Pie-throwing is part of that movement.''

In general, pieing is a leftist activity with anarchist overtones. Targets tend to be identified with big business or forces seen as hostile to the environment, public health and/or human rights. The manifesto of the Biotic Baking Brigade, a San Francisco-based pie-throwing group whose members employ such pseudonyms as ''Agent Apple'' and ''Agent Pecan,'' inveighs against ''the technocrats who dominate industrial society.''

Thus, the B.B.B. has creamed Monsanto's chief executive, Robert Shapiro, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and Martina McGlaughlin, director of the biotechnology program at the University of California at Davis. ''We are working toward a time when corporate crooks and their lackeys in government and the nonprofit sector will have to leave this bioregion for fear of our delicious mischief,'' the B.B.B. pledges.

''The right wing doesn't have that kind of sense of humor,'' observed Professor Epstein. ''If you're concerned with law and order, you're probably not going to be throwing pies.''

Professor Bloom added: ''It's assault, clearly, but pies defuse the anger and identify the target as a clown. If someone dumped feces or blood or mock toxic waste on you, that would be a lot more threatening.''

Most victims treat their attacks with good humor. When the pie aimed at Secretary Glickman only grazed him, he joked, ''That was not a very balanced meal.'' An amused Ms. McGlaughlin accused her ostensibly anti-biotech assailants of hypocrisy: ''The pies were store-bought, so they were filled with genetically modified food components.''

Not everyone is cracking a smile over this merry pranksterism. Three B.B.B. agents who pied San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in 1998 to protest his policies toward the homeless were convicted on misdemeanor battery charges and sentenced to six months in prison. After Tim Eyman was pied in June for sponsoring a Washington State initiative to reduce funds for public transit, he complained of corneal abrasion and chemical burns from the warhead's fruit filling.

''I think it's terrible,'' said the comedian Soupy Sales, who estimates he has been on the receiving end of some 20,000 pies during his career. ''Leave pies to the professional idiots. Better to sit back and enjoy them with a cup of coffee or a glass of milk.''